Arguments

[Have another bad argument? Comment below.]

There are a lot of arguments bandied about as rationales for any given grammar prescription. Most of them are spurious, but a few have some merit. I’m listing them here so that I can refer to them in various posts to support or undermine prescriptivists’ arguments. After all, the best way to refute a prescriptivist’s argument is to simultaneously show them that their argument is ill-founded, but even if they persist with that ill-founded argument, they’re still wrong.

#1: Usage From Years Past [examples]
Perhaps the most common claim of prescriptivists is that they’re battening the hatches of our language against the ravages of our ill-educated age. This claim comes through in arguments that a certain form should be preferred because it is what the great writers of years past used. Oh, it’s a seductive mistress, this argument. Wouldn’t we all like to write like those great names of yore? Who doesn’t fancy himself an Alexander Pope or herself an Emily Bronte? But of course this isn’t a solid argument for what our modern language ought to be. For instance, if we went back toEarly Modern English, there would be a much more flexible word order: “as the law should them direct” (The Early Records of the Town of Providence, 1896) and “ye” would be an acceptable second person singular pronoun (e.g., “Hear ye, hear ye”). Another example is Strunk’s admonition of 1918 that “a conditional statement in the first person requires should, not would“. His example, I should not have succeeded without his help does not mean the same thing as I would not have succeeded without his help in contemporary English. Times change, usage changes. Sorry.Summary: simple, seductive, and wrong

#2: Appeals to Logic [examples]
A lot of prescriptivists are enamoured of the idea that language is at its core a delightful, logical system. Take for example Brad of h3h’s argument that different than is “illogical”, and only different from should be used. The idea of such an argument is simple: (illustrated with the h3h examples)

constructions X and Y have the same meaning.

there is a construction Y’ with the same meaning and usage patterns as Y but some syntactic difference Z.

there is no construction X’ with the same meaning and usage patterns as X and the syntactic difference Z.

Therefore: since X and Y are equivalent, if X’ is ungrammatical, then Y’ must be ungrammatical as well

To illustrate this, consider Brad’s argument for the supremacy of different from. Let X be differs from and Y be is different from. He claims that (1) is met because John differs from Bill is equivalent to John is different from Bill. Now let Y’ be is different than, which is the same as Y but with than replacing from (this is the syntactic difference Z). Y and Y’ are equivalent, so (2) is met. However, if we replace from in differs from by than, we get *differs than, which is not grammatical, so (3) is satisfied. With (1)-(3) satisfied, the claim is that (4) must logically follow.
Which, of course, it does not. Different than is perfectly fine; language doesn’t rely on this sort of logic. There’re at least three problems with basing your grammatical decisions on such arguments:

language is not a logical system

no two constructions are perfectly equivalent

there is no reason to suspect that two equivalent constructions would undergo the same transformations

Summary: Misguided. Language isn’t math.

#3: Ambiguity Avoidance [examples]
This argument has its place. Certainly, sentences like every child knows two words are bad if it’s important that the reader know whether the children have to know the same two words. The same’s true of Jasper told Abe that no one liked him, where him could refer to either Jasper or Abe, depending on whether Jasper is mean or depressed. The problem with this argument is that it’s quite often used in situations where the ambiguity is somewhere between negligible and non-existent. For instance, it has been used to object to spelling stanch (a verb) as staunch (an adjective), even though the verb and adjective meanings are nearly impossible to confuse.

The key difference is between potential and effective ambiguity, as Arnold Zwicky ably puts it. It’s often good to avoid effective ambiguity, like that of the “every children” and “Jasper & Abe” sentences, but avoiding potential ambiguity, like the stanch/staunch situation, is rarely necessary.

Summary: Reasonable, but too often invoked for phantom ambiguities.

#4: Avoiding Overuse
Now here’s a relatively solid argument. Some rules of grammar are created because if youngsters don’t have them, they’ll be stylistically awful. I remember as a kid having it drilled into my head that you should never never never start a sentence with a conjunction. And I remember seeing red pen on sentences just like this one for daring to break this immutable rule that I now break regularly. But that’s sort of the point. Kids will start every sentence with a conjunction if you don’t stop them – because that’s what we do when speaking. (Just try to note all of the wells, anyways, ands, sos, buts, and the like used between sentences in your next conversation!) Adults, on the other hand, develop a sense of times when a sentence justifies being started with a conjunction, and should be willing to break this rule in those situations.

Likewise, one could argue that injunctions against passive voice, using first-person pronouns, semicolons, or using very are intended (at least in part) to prevent overuse by the stylistically-challenged. The problem is that too many people have reinterpreted these as inviolable rules and claim that these should never be used, not even sparingly.

Summary: These have their place, in moderation.

#5: Omit Needless Words [examples]
One of the catchiest three-word phrases in editing, this was Strunk’s mantra. Its idea is sound; a longer sentence is generally harder to understand than a shorter one, especially when the words have little semantic contribution. One example where Strunk is on the right track is his suggestion to replace there is no doubt but that with doubtless. But there is a problem in that it’s unclear what exactly a needless word is. If needless words are those that are not strictly necessary for grammaticality, that’s problematic. Consider a relative clause starting with that was, as in (1). Officially, such clauses in English do not need the that was, as shown in (1):

(1) is fine whether that was is in it or not, but (2b) is horrendous without these technically “needless” words. As it turns out, there are lots of cases where words unnecessary for grammaticality are essentially necessary for the sentence to be readable. More on this later.

Summary: Omit only words that are both truly superfluous and get in the way of comprehension.

About The Blog

A lot of people make claims about what "good English" is. Much of what they say is flim-flam, and this blog aims to set the record straight. Its goal is to explain the motivations behind the real grammar of English and to debunk ill-founded claims about what is grammatical and what isn't. Somehow, this was enough to garner a favorable mention in the Wall Street Journal.

About Me

I'm Gabe Doyle, currently a postdoctoral scholar in the Language and Cognition Lab at Stanford University. Before that, I got a doctorate in linguistics from UC San Diego and a bachelor's in math from Princeton.

In my research, I look at how humans manage one of their greatest learning achievements: the acquisition of language. I build computational models of how people can learn language with cognitively-general processes and as few presuppositions as possible. Currently, I'm working on models for acquiring phonology and other constraint-based aspects of cognition.

I also examine how we can use large electronic resources, such as Twitter, to learn about how we speak to each other. Some of my recent work uses Twitter to map dialect regions in the United States.

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18 comments

[…] before. Intelligent posts, interestingly written. Plus, a dead-on informational page, simply titled “Arguments.” By way of introduction: There are a lot of arguments bandied about as rationales for any given […]

Much appreciated. For ONW, you might stress that this is a question of style, not grammar (as you say elsewhere of Strunk and White). Basil Bunting, a very good poet, advised, Cut out every word you dare. But this is a technique to get a particular effect, a dense poetry in which every syllable needs lingering over. Evidently he just didn’t like Spenser or Swinburne, or the chattiness of the New York School, but that doesn’t mean we can’t like the whole spectrum.

Excellent. Another argument you might consider tackling is the “Argument from Safety”, which goes along the lines of:

“Even if one theoretically accepts some prescriptivist rule to be wrong, it’s safer to go with it because many people in positions of authority (e.g. teachers, employers) will come from backgrounds where they were taught it, and they’ll will mark you down if you don’t follow it”.

I’m never sure what to say to people about that. I’m old enough to afford to be bolshie (no more hoops to jump) so it’s easy for me to advise people to break prescriptive myths, but I can see that it would be a worry when grades/applications are at stake.

You’ve done a good job summarizing some prescriptivist beefs, but I don’t think you’ve managed to debunk any of them. You may take the same glee in rebelling against old usages that others take in defending them, but your glee is no more or less founded than theirs. “Wrong” does not follow from “seductive.” If an old construction is more elegant and efficient than its newer replacement, the newer is wrong, however refreshing you may find it.

And while you claim that language isn’t a logical system, why shouldn’t it be? Language isn’t math, but like math it works because it follows a set of rules. The only way to justify favoring an illogical construction over a logical one is to show that people have a harder time with the latter, but that’s only because they aren’t used to it; once they learn it, see the logic in it, and practice it until it comes naturally, they’ll be better able to express themselves, which is the purpose of language. America speaks the same way it measures, using a hodgepodge of illogical conventions that would be better replaced with a logical system. That the metric system hasn’t yet been implemented here does not mean that it shouldn’t.

If a rule can’t be supported by logic, we can rightly ignore it. But you have to be fair. You’re quite right that “different than” is not wrong, but not just on the grounds that sometimes you feel like using “than” instead of “from.” “From” is a preposition, so it precedes a noun. “Than” is a subordinating conjunction, so it precedes a clause. We use “different from” before nouns and “different from” before clauses. The distinction is not arbitrary but proceeds naturally from concepts (such as parts of speech) that a language cannot do without.

Descriptivists (and would it be fair to say that everyone in a linguistics program today is a descriptivist? I’m not in one, so I wouldn’t know) love the democratic notion that what’s correct is what the majority uses. Imagine if the same philosophy dominated the software industry. How buggy would our programs be if our authors stitched them lazily together from phrases they’d just picked up somewhere? Language must be more communist than democratic if its purpose of smooth, elegant expression is to be achieved.

That may sound evil, but remember that while capitalist competition is good for consumers because it pushes quality up and prices down, competition among grammatical constructions is bad for consumers because it obscures meaning. Every time I open my mouth to express an idea, I choose from many constructions. One of them has the best chance of being understood, so it is superior to the others. Nothing subjective about it.

The only thing that can defeat good grammar is bad habits. And while you can spend all day showing me how entrenched those habits are, I don’t think you’ll be able to show me that they aren’t bad, that they shouldn’t be changed.

To Ray Girvan,
Teachers are typically among the most egregious offenders of language, rewarding kids for flowery, overblown, adjective- and adverb-heavy descriptions that do nothing at all to get at the essence of a thing. This does not stop in high school. Legion are those who were labeled “brilliant writers” during their undergraduate university careers, only to then spend their professional careers convinced of their own superiority and undermining the good efforts of those who are their superiors in terms of training, knowledge and experience.

Logic on its own can never tell us what’s true. All logic tells us is what must be true, assuming that certain other things are true.

That’s why it works so well for maths. For instance in number theory, we can start by assuming the Peano axioms are true, and then logically work out what else must be true. It doesn’t show whether or not those axioms are right or wrong, but its widely agreed that if we start with those axioms the things that logically follow from them are interesting and useful.

In the classic syllogism, we do not establish logically that Socrates is a man. Logic only shows that if all men are mortal, and if Socrates is a man (and if ‘man’ is used in the same sense in both parts) then Socrates must be mortal.

People who make apparently ‘logical’ claims about what is or isn’t correct language often seem to forget that the best logic can do is show that their conclusions must follow from their assumptions. It can’t show whether or not their initial assumptions are correct.

In the real world, if if reasonable beliefs lead logically to something implausible, that may be a cause to question the original beliefs. It doesn’t always prove that the implausible thing is also reasonable.

Hi, Gabe,
Would you consider making a comment on the use of “into” in phrases such as “tuned into broadcast television” or “walked into a bar?” (meaning, “walked in to a bar”.) I had thought people were just being lazy on Facebook and Twitter, but now I have seen this in a book published by Doubleday Religion in 2010, and I am wondering if my irritation with this phenomenon is yet another indication that I am getting too old to appreciate modern communications, or if I am rightly reacting to an abomination. How do the “in” in the verb phrase “tuned in” and the “to” in the prepositional phrase become one word, which, to me, has an entirely different meaning?
Thanks,
Trish

I think Strunk was right to say “Omit Needless Words”. It does make reading more easy and comprehensible. But my argument to your argument is when do you consider a word ‘needless”?

In your 2a example, omitting the phrase “that was” would change the meaning of the sentece and thus it becomes a “useful” phrase in that sentence rather than a “needless” one. After all “needless” words are ALWAYS unnecessary thats why they are called such.

You should always note not to take the helpful writer’s advice (or the prescriptivists as you would say) at FACE value. When Strunk urged for the use of “should” instead of “would” is permissible given the age of the advice, just as he prefers “studenry” than addresing group of students. That said, these advices are time-bounded. They can be absolutely right at one moment and get banned the next day. And besides when you said “most common claim of prescriptivists”, can you actually name them? As far culture is concerned, language is always arbitary.

I’m interested in finding out what linguists think about http://www.urbandictionary.com, I’ve searched Google but haven’t turned up much. The site has words that are not included in the traditional dictionary but do reflect the word usage choices of speakers from a growing idiolect.

Prescriptivists would disparage a site/dictionary disseminating examples of ‘sub-standard’ English. Would you summarize their objections, the same way as you did for argument #4 above? Anyways, what do you think about that it?

Hi Gabe, is the reason why “different from” and “different than” are both correct because “from” and “than” both have the same meaning? I would only side with using “different from” because I think of “more than” when I hear “different than.”
This sounds incorrect… ****My eyes are different than yours.***
vs. My eyes are different from yours.

Gabe, I think Kendall has a valid point, and I wish you’d comment on it.

Just to add my own angle…

Especially for written language, I think it’s a misconception that people should necessarily be taught to write “their native language” in the narrowest sense, i.e. their own ideolect, as they speak it. You seem to agree, since you argue that maybe it’s good that people don’t start their written sentences with conjunctions as often as their spoken ones.

I think one has to realize that to some extent what one is taught to write is a standard language, standardized in order to ease communication between people with different ideolects.

So how should people be taught to write this standard language? I think there are many things to take into consideration, and proximity with and/or inclusiveness of the ideolects of its speakers is just some of the factors. Others could be continuity, logic, conciseness, ease of learning and so on.

I think one reason for seemingly silly prescriptions is that there is no agreed-upon standard. So prescriptivists try to pull the language in whichever direction they find the most beneficial. Yes, often they’re plain wrong, but often it can also be a case of too many cooks spoiling the food.

The Spanish has the RAE, Real Academia Española, which provides a standard Spanish. I lean towards thinking that it’s beneficial. Speakers might or might not agree with it, and some probably suffer more than others because their native ideolect is further away from the standard than others. But at least it’s a standard.

Whether Spanish suffers less from silly prescriptions than English thanks to the RAE, I’m not sure. It would be interesting to hear other people’s insight.

I’m surprised no one has mentioned the incorrect statement in the first item: “Ye” was most decidedly not the [nominative] second person singular pronoun in Early Modern English. It was, rather, the plural; the singular was “thou”.

This is entirely your opinion, I love prescriptivism. I’ve been a die-hard prescriptivist since I exited the womb! You are ignorant if you are a descriptivist, simple as. *drops mic and exits stage area*